There is something more than cheeky about a Tom Perotta novel. Although marketed as popular fiction with a big screen adaptation around the bend, they also play host to a mean literary streak. This doesn’t destabilize his output; rather, it makes Perotta exciting and slightly unpredictable. He’s got what you might call authorial moxie.
In previous novels like Election or the terrific Little Children, Perotta demonstrated his knack for blurring the line between adult and child, moral and immoral, grim and funny. He lays out plot and characters so intelligently and sensitively, we navigate his perfect world the way his suburban protagonists cruise their leafy-green neighborhoods in shiny SUVs. This is part of what distinguishes Perotta as a marvelously vigilant writer, but his hand appears maddeningly in the frame. Sometimes, things are too pristine, as if he couldn’t quite let go. The Abstinence Teacher does not differ in this regard, but feels more liberated, partially because the shifting character perspectives work better than they did in Little Children.
At the hub of The Abstinence Teacher is lonely sex-ed teacher Ruth, your liberal-minded, intimacy- promotin’ divorced mother of two. Add one addiction-recovering Born Again named Tim, a regressive new high school curriculum, and what do you get? Ethical hijinks with a light dusting of sexual tension. In spite of this formulaic pop rock of a setup, Abstinence works because the refreshing way in which the “odd couple” cliché is dismantled: it never explodes, but rather keeps simmering to the very last page. Perotta revels in writing about middle-class educated suburbanites with a piece missing from the existential puzzle—he draws it so well—the language, the school politics, the soccer matches. When I finished the book, it was hard to believe I was Canadian, not some Midwestern sap. Perotta handles the so-called “adult world” like a slightly more forgiving John Cheever. He lays the hypocrisy down on the table for all to see, but never tortures his characters for their flaws. All of the villains, like Joann Marlow—perky-breasted advocate of an ABSTINENCE ONLY, CHILDREN! sex-ed program, are viewed in a generous light, ridiculous, rather than nefarious.
Where Perotta shines is in his ability to write children. They are adults without the double-dealing; ingenuous but also cynical. Through the eyes of their floundering parents, they are both sources of delight—as in the way Tim views his daughter, and the team of girls he coaches and objects of mystery and pain, such as Ruth’s response to her teenage daughter’s desire to “want to know Jesus.” Maybe it’s not a stylistic or thematically subtle book, but what it does, it does effectively.
